Hi people,
I wondering how I can get windows to boot up from within Linux? I know Wine can run applications, but I don’t think it would play iTunes protected music from within iTunes from Windows via Wine.
I heard of some other choices. I like the idea of being able to boot Windows XP from within openSuse 11.
Can anyone tell me what my options are? Is there anything free out there? And is is hard to use? I know the idea behind virtulisation but I haven’t done anything with it yet.
Thanks
Deian
There’s also Virtualbox (google for it).
Virtualbox and VMWare require that you have a Windows OS. So an app should work like it did on Windows.
Wine only runs the application, not the OS. And only a subset of apps work under Wine, you can check which ones at winehq.org
Ok, I gathered that. So Wine is not the answer for me.
So between Virtualbox and VMware, which one is recommended?
I see with VMware, there is the Player, and the workstation and the server, which one do I need to run Windows from within Linux. Only the Player is free.
I am googling Virtualbox now.
Thanks so far.
I dual boot XP x64 and Suse x64 and run VirtualBox on both, in XP x64 I run Suse x32 virtualy and in Suse x64 I run XP x32. I only use XP x64 to game and work in Suse. VirtualBox runs great on both OS’s.
deian I’ve just tried the virtualbox from the repository in Suse 11 and it works fine, it didn’t in 10.3, had to install the one off their site
If you wanna add the virtualbox repository do it like this:
Open Yast, go Software, Software Repositories
In the new screen click the Add button to the bottom left and the screen changes to Media Type, with a list of types, select Community Repositories and click Next
When Yast has finished scanning it gives you a repository list, select the one that says “Virtualization (VirtualBox)” … and any others you may wanna add (the PackMan one has some nice packages), click Ok when you’ve made your selection(s)
You can then click Finish to exit and open the package manager, in the package manager search box, just type virtualbox and tick virtualbox-ose to install, it should automatically choose the right kernel
Ok thanks, I’ve done that. I’m trying to boot into Windows XP. But how do I configure it to boot from the harddrive. Or does it need to be some kind of weird image, such as an ISO or whatever. This thing baffles me!
Or can I somehow point to the way grub starts windows when I select it from the list on boot?
Your help would be most appreciated.
Thanks
Deian
To change the boot options for OpenSUSE, open up YaST and login with your root password. Once YaST loads, type boot in the search field and an icon for Boot Loader should come up. There you can find and edit the names, priorities and locations of the boots. Once you save the changes, all the boot options when you turn on your computer and see the OpenSUSE boot screen will be set to the options you have provided. I’m not sure if the boot loader is what you were looking for, but from experience, that would be a good place to check.
As for virtualization, Wine is a pretty good. There are some things that they can improve on, and from using it, OpenSUSE is not the most supported distribution from Linux, but it will support many of the popular Windows programs. To find out more information on Wine, check this link out. There, you can find out all the official information on Wine and news on the most recent releases. To check if a program is supported by Wine, or any changes that Wine may need before installing, refer to the Wine Application Database. You can use the search field in the left column to search for specific programs in the database. As mentioned before, Wine is not foolproof, but it works pretty well for common and popular Windows programs.
If you are looking into a virtual machine, I would suggest VMWare. But if you intend to run intense programs (hardware-wise, requiring a lot of memory), I wouldn’t suggest using a virtual machine unless you have a good amount of memory. I only have 1GB, so I usually only give the virtual machine a portion of this, maybe 512MB of RAM, so it runs slow and runs intense programs poorly. If I allocated all my RAM to the virtual machine, I would have problems running my desktop, so I try to steer-clear of that. If you want to install VMWare on your system, check this tutorial out. The part on VMWare will guide you through installing it and check this tutorial out if you want to convert an existing Windows system to a virtual machine that you can run through VMWare.
Sorry for the long post, but hope it helps! 
That’s why you need an installable copy of Windows, say on CD. You won’t be able to use your OEM copy that’s preinstalled on the machine. Virtualbox simulates a hard disk inside a file. It’s a totally separate environment which makes it nice to test things in isolation.
deian wrote:
> Ok thanks, I’ve done that. I’m trying to boot into Windows XP. But how
> do I configure it to boot from the harddrive. Or does it need to be
> some kind of weird image, such as an ISO or whatever. This thing
> baffles me!
>
> Or can I somehow point to the way grub starts windows when I select it
> from the list on boot?
>
> Your help would be most appreciated.
>
> Thanks
> Deian
>
>
I would suggest looking at
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/User_HOWTOS
where there’s an entry on migrating windows to virtualbox which includes
links to useful tools.
You may then be able to use a disk copy program/CD to backup your
windows system and restore it in the VM.
Good luck.
–
PeeGee
Asus M2V-MX SE, AMD 64X2 3800+, openSuSE 10.3 x86-64/XP Home dual boot
Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD LE1640, openSuSE 11.0 x86-64/XP Home dual boot
Hi,
Just for the record.
I recently need Windows XP, lamentably, for running and test some apps, so I looked to virtualization.
I tried XEN, it worked running windows xp, but the performance is very very but very poor (even running in my new Thinkpad T61 with 3 GB RAM with SLED10 SP2, and the worst of all I could not make work the network with my wireless conection, I spent a lot of days looking for the solution but I didn’t found), I really wanted to give it a try because of the open source support but for the production use Xen is not ready.
I didn’t have time to test virtualbox or the other one (qemu?).
I went for vmware and the performance and functions are very very superior to Xen by the moment, and I don’t have to change kernels (default or xen), I’m very happy with it, but of corse is not open source 